Pragmatic Variation of Forms of Address in Golden Age Spanish
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Abstract
This study examines the diachronic variation of the distribution and pragmatic functions of pronominal (i.e., T – ‘you’ informal; V – ‘you’ formal) and nominal forms of address (i.e., John, Mr., Doctor, buddy). The objective is to investigate pragmatic variation, defined here as the speaker’s strategic shift in forms (i.e., tú → vos and v.v.) within the same communicative turn, in order to determine whether there was a transition between Brown and Gilman’s (1960) semantics of power and solidarity during the Spanish Golden Age. The data was derived from a literary corpus consisting of Ana Caro’s two existing Spanish comedies, Valor, agravio y mujer (c. 1630) and El Conde Partinuplés (1653), yielding 643 instances of pronominal forms of address and 344 examples of vocatives, each of which were examined according to distribution, social power of the interlocutors, expressed linguistic behavior, communicative contexts, and pragmatic variation. The results of the analysis of the pronominal forms of address revealed an expansion of the use of the informal tú over the course of two decades, indicating an unequivocal trend in seventeenth-century Spanish speech to be governed by subjective degrees of social distance and solidarity rather than objective hierarchical power ranks. The diachronic analysis of nominal forms of address unveils the development of vocative grammaticalization between the years 1630 and 1653 as a pragmatic strategy to reconcile the existing baroque social structure with the oncoming solidarity semantic during the Spanish Golden Age. This study contributes to the field of historical Spanish pragmatics.
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